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USU Focuses on Sustainable Seafood for Third Annual Food Day

Thursday, Oct. 17, 2013

The deep blue will go green on Thursday, Oct. 24, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. during Utah State University’s third annual celebration of Food Day. Activities take place at the Hub in the Taggart Student Center.

The nationwide event is a culmination of year-long efforts by the Food Day organization to encourage healthy, affordable and sustainably produced food.

According to Tamara Steinitz, dietetics program director and clinical associate professor in the Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Food Sciences, fisheries are being depleted and the world is projected to be fishless by the year 2045. Sustainable seafood, she said, means catching, farming and preparing fish in environmentally sensible ways.

It means, “using less of it and in a wiser way so that the stores aren’t being depleted by the next couple of decades,” she said.

Students in Steinitz’s advanced dietetics practicum class who organized the event as a class project wanted to focus on three areas of seafood sustainability: why it’s important, how to buy seafood and how to cook it, Steinitz said. Events during Food Day such as interactive displays, food samples and chef demonstrations will center around one of these three areas.

Seafood also has a lot of healthy benefits that many people don’t utilize in their diets, Steinitz said, and Food Day will help students to realize those benefits.

“We just want people to come out and be able to see that food is not about restriction, it’s about learning how to eat healthy while still loving what you’re eating,” said Ashley Lee, one of Steinitz’s students in the dietetics practicum class. “That’s what we do for Food Day is present different ways to eat that maybe they wouldn’t think of.”

Steinitz came up with the idea to focus on fish for Food Day while living in Oregon this past summer. She said that while there, it was her goal to learn how to cook fish and in doing so, she learned not only how to cook fish but about the fish industry. She specifically came in contact with Port Orford Sustainable Seafood, a community supported fishery, and thought sustainable seafood would be a good focus for this year’s Food Day, she said.

Steinitz proposed the idea to executive director of USU Dining Services Alan Anderson. He and a few Dining Services chefs were enthusiastic about the idea and traveled to Port Orford, Ore., to tour the processing facility. Port Orford Sustainable Seafood’s fish will be used for Food Day demonstrations.

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